For much of my life I never attended a religious service other than from my own tradition. Only rarely did I even enter a non-Catholic church and I cannot remember ever having been to a synagogue or the temple of any non-Christian  religion. My family internalized the warnings of Catholic leaders not to take part in the rites of other religious groups for fear of harming the purity of our own faith.

Of course, those were pre-ecumenical days, a time when Christian churches did not go much beyond mutual toleration and non-Christian communities seemed to people like me bereft of truth about God. Looking back on that era, it is hard not to wonder how I could have been so narrow and wary of exploring different ways of being religious. One of the many reasons I value the approach of old age is the opportunity it brings to reevaluate the ideals of younger days and to experiment with the truth more freely.

These brief reflections I offer as a prelude to describing a visit to the new Mormon Temple in Belmont, that imposing structure rising up next to Route 2. My motive in wishing to see this monument was not simply to satisfy curiosity about the building but rather to explore Mormon spirituality. Apparently some other people had the same idea: how else does one explain the outpouring of an estimated eighty thousand visitors during the few weeks in which the temple was open to the general public?

In being taken through the building sacred to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as the Mormons call their community, I had the advantage of having as guide Roger Porter, who has served as a bishop. In his professional life, he is a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and he has worked in the White House as a policy advisor to Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush.

Talking beforehand with Professor Porter, I asked what his religious tradition means to him. His response has stayed with me: “I find inspiration from my faith in virtually everything I do.” That he and his fellow Mormons has discovered such life- shaping meaning in this home-grown American religious tradition coming from the early nineteenth century provokes me to reflection. Appreciation of his faith from Roger Porter and millions of other people helps explain why Mormon membership has been growing so fast, up to its current estimated ten million here and abroad.

Early in my visit, two surprising facts emerged: First, the building, its size so imposing from the outside, has an interior without large cathedral-like spaces, but rather with a series of small rooms used for individual prayer and various rites. Secondly, the temple is closed on Sundays because the community gathers in its meeting house for worship, instruction, and other social events on that day.

Several themes, prominent in the faith of the Latter-Day Saints, find expression in the temple’s physical structure. The baptistry looms large,  with its font resting on the backs of twelve sculptured oxen symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel. In Mormon practice, baptism is performed “in behalf of those who have died.” It is a way of giving the dead an opportunity to accept the gospel.

The other rite important to the temple is Sealing, the uniting of partners in marriage. This takes place in the Sealing Room, an area where bride and groom are wedded not simply for their life on earth, but also for eternity. Children issuing from such a marriage “are sealed to parents, creating eternal families.”

Immediately inside the front door is the Waiting Area. There the credentials of arrivers will be checked to verify that they are Latter-Day Saints in good standing. After proceeding from this area, they change into all-white clothing that signifies two realities: 1) they are putting aside the cares of the world; and 2) economic or social distinctions among them mean nothing.

Everything in the temple leads up to the Celestial Room. This brightest of the spaces in the building is also the tallest, rising two-and-a-half stories. Twelve chandeliers hang from the ceiling and slender stained-glass windows cast their own light. Mormons who enter this room are to experience a foretaste of heaven with its peace and happiness.

Like all good experiences of other people’s faith, this visit gave me some insight into a different spirituality and another perspective on my own. To the hospitality of the Latter-Day Saints, I owe another step forward in my ongoing appreciation of people whose faith differs from my own.

I admire the devotion of Mormon friends, their zeal for their beliefs, and the personal care they show for one another. This latter quality of the community impresses me deeply because it ranks as one of the most precious of spiritual qualities and the one by which most religious traditions say they want to be judged.

Richard Griffin

When I was young, I did not know that Jesus was a Jew. In fact, well into my adult years, I did not realize this basic fact about him. This ignorance lasted despite a religious education that was long and detailed. As far as I can remember, none of my teachers made explicit the ethnic origins of the central figure in my Christian faith.

Probably I considered Jesus to have been a Catholic, the first person to bear that title. After all, he was the founder of the Church and the one who chose apostles to carry on his mission. That all of these men were themselves Jewish was also a fact not present to my naïve awareness.

It was only with the arrival of the Second Vatican Council in 1963 that I began to think differently about the origins of my Christian tradition. In particular, the Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, published two years later, helped me better appreciate my religious roots. That document refers to “the son of the Virgin Mary” and states that “from the Jewish people sprang the apostles, her foundation stones and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ to the world.”

At a remove of 35 years, this message seems obvious now and its language already old fashioned, but for Catholics like me it came as a memorable breakthrough. Among other things, it established a new way for us to think about who Jesus was and who are the people from which he came.

But now, by this stage of my life, I have come to appreciate the Jewishness of Jesus. It has become a fact that I wish to learn more about. Far from detracting from the value of my own religious tradition, this knowledge has added to its richness. I find it stimulating to reflect on these origins and welcome what Jewish scholars have to say about this subject.

This brief account of personal history has been prompted by a statement issued by people calling themselves an interdenominational group of Jewish scholars and published on a full page of the New York Times on Sunday, September 10. Entitled “Dabru Emet” (Hebrew for “Speak the Truth”), it was written by professors at the Universities of Chicago, Toronto, Virginia, and Notre Dame and endorsed by more than 150 other academics and rabbis.

This path-breaking document is intended as a thoughtful response to efforts by official Catholic and Protestant church groups to express regret and repentance for Christian mistreatment of Jews and Judaism.

I find it to be a fine piece of work, bold in its expression of religious principles and generous toward Christians. In that spirit, the authors say  “we believe it is time for Jews to learn about the efforts of Christians to honor Judaism.”  They then go on to make eight brief statements “about how Jews and Christians may relate to one another.”

Rather than attempt to summarize here the whole text, I urge interested readers to look for it themselves, either in the New York Times edition mentioned above or at the Internet site www.beliefnet.com.  Let me instead simply list the main headings of the eight paragraphs and draw your attention to two of the paragraphs that I find most striking.

1. Jews and Christians worship the same God.
2. Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book – the Bible.
3. Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel.
4. Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah.
5. Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon.
6. The humanly irreconcilable difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the whole world as promised in Scripture.
7. A new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice.
8. Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace.

The fifth statement, the one about Christians and Nazism impressed me for its assertion that despite the involvement of too many Christians in Nazi atrocities against Jews, “Nazism itself was not an inevitable outcome of Christianity.” In view of the sorry history of widespread acceptance of Nazi ideology and practice among Christians, this amounts to a crucial distinction and one that makes it possible for Jews to respect Christianity as a faith.

The sixth paragraph also strikes me as a model for mutual respect. It calls upon each faith community to be faithful to its own tradition, not claiming  the more accurate interpretation of Scripture nor seeking to exercise political power over the other community. “Jews can respect Christians’ faithfulness to their revelation just as we expect Christians to respect our faithfulness to our revelation.”

I feel grateful for having lived long enough to see these bold, yet reconciling affirmations from leaders who share kinship with Jesus, the person who lived and died as a Jew.

Richard Griffin

In my family, people like to tell an anecdote about a favorite uncle, Bill, who had the reputation of being kind and open to everyone he met. Such was his good nature that he would greet strangers with warmth, so much so that we used to fear others taking advantage of him.

One day, it is told, Bill was coming down the front stairs inside his house. At the same time, another man, rather tipsy from imbibing too much, was walking up. Bill, according to the story, hailed the intruder with a friendly greeting, and then continued his way down and out the door.

This tale, not without fictitious added details perhaps, gets repeated often when our extended family gathers for anniversaries or other events. The younger members who have heard the story more than once are probably thoroughly bored with it by now. It’s the kind of tale that I myself in my younger days used to turn off as not worth repetition. I was looking instead for things that I had not heard before.

Now that I have reached a certain age, however, I have come to see that the telling of such stories can easily be underrated. Perhaps they amount to a rite that has great importance for the elders of the family and even for the younger members as well.

Writer James Hillman tells of interrupting his uncle in the middle of a time-worn story. “You’ve already told me that,” the nephew said. His uncle’s riposte, delivered at lightening speed, was “I like telling it.” Under his breath, the uncle probably said (as Hillman imagines), “And what the hell is wrong with telling it again? Don’t you know anything about the pleasure of telling the same stories?”

Of his uncle, Hillman adds, “He knew the pleasure of the groove.” He goes on to suggest that it is shortsighted to judge repetition as an addiction. “Why not, instead, conceive of the need for novelty as an addiction?” he asks.

In exploring the time-honored story, this Jungian analyst suggests that the story genre causes boredom only if you listen to it for facts. If, for example, grandmother tells about a fire that almost destroyed her house and details who did what to escape, the mere facts might leave listeners cold.

However, Hillman says, “The story is also a lesson about concealed dangers, about protecting ‘home,’ about family collaboration, and about the character of each of the ‘characters’ whose styles emerge through the emergency.”

Stories like the grandmother’s aim to establish a permanency that, amid the ceaseless flow of life’s events, reassure us that some things stay the same. “It is as if the soul begs for the same stories so that it knows that something will last.”

You may be tempted to dismiss this kind of analysis as the feverish speculations of an imagination run amok. But it does help me realize how superficial I can be in dismissing family rites and rituals cherished by friends. They do indeed often have the power to feed the soul and to enhance our lives.

Hillman carries it even further. “That forgetful old uncle, that tiresome grandmother offer a foretaste of the eternal. They function as ancestors, reminding us that recapitulation is the way the world really works.”

The writer concludes the matter thus: “Nothing is more tedious than practicing your scales or mumbling your beads. Yet the accomplishments of art, the efficacy of prayer, the beauty of ritual, and the force of character depend on petty repetitions any instant of which, taken for itself alone, seems utterly useless.”

If soul is what counts most, then family stories would seem to have great value indeed. Those who have cultivated “the pleasure of the groove” may have more wisdom than we think. Whether highly educated or not, they develop a sense of self-worth as tellers of the tale. They are fulfilling a role held important always and everywhere, I suspect, because it’s a powerful instrument for continuity.

If Hillman is right in suggesting that repetition does indeed point toward the eternal, then its spiritual content is even richer. “Is that all there is?” remains a potent question demanding an answer. Perhaps we can find in the traditions of family story-telling signs that point onward and upward. The actual stories may sound hokey sometimes but they can come freighted with values that we ignore only at our peril.

We could do worse than to ponder what Thomas Lynch writes in his 1998 book of poems, Still Life in Milford: “How we repeat ourselves, like stars in the dark night, / and after Darwin, Freud and popes and worlds at war, / we are still our father’s sons and daughters / still our mother’s darling girls and boys, / aging first, then aged then ageless.”

Richard Griffin

Diane Meier, M.D., buys tall stacks of paperback editions of Tolstoy’s classic story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” This she does so that the students, medical residents, and others whom she supervises can read this inspired account of a man who refuses to face the truth about his approaching death. She believes that this narrative can help awaken young doctors to end-of-life issues.

Dr. Meier, founder of the palliative care program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, takes a leading role in the second program of Bill Moyers’ public television series “On Our Own Terms.” This series, broadcast in Boston this week, champions what Moyers calls “a different kind of care” for people who cannot be cured of life-threatening disease.

In his famous novella centering on the dying Ivan Ilyitch, Tolstoy showed in stark detail how fatal illness devastates a man who is emotionally cut off from family and friends and from his own inner self. His pain, both physical and spiritual, is intense and he suffers a devastating crisis of belief. Only in his last moments, through the compassion of a young man servant, does Ivan discover his soul and see the darkness of his dying yield to light.

Health care pioneers such as Dr. Meier are shown in the Moyers series as leading the way toward a set of medical priorities different from those normal in the American health care system at large. They focus first on pain and work to control and relieve the suffering of their terminally ill patients. These physicians are trying to get their colleagues to recognize that pain is both debilitating and unnecessary.

Doctors are not the only ones who fail to see the importance of dealing with pain. Patients themselves often believe it undesirable to eliminate pain altogether. So do members of their families.

That’s the way it was with Matt Wilson, only 23 years old, who is shown dying at Mt. Sinai. His family fears that, if Matt’s pain is relieved, then he will lose his desire to fight for life.

Similarly, another patient, Harold Resnick, refuses pain medication at first because he is afraid that taking medication will be equivalent to resigning himself to death. Dr. Meier begins talking with these patients and their families so that they can see how relieving pain can help them cope better with their actual situation.

Watching these people wrestle with devastating illness is admittedly not easy. I have taken no pleasure in doing so, nor in writing about the Moyers series. However, I stand convinced that end-of-life  issues have crucial importance for everyone. I return to these questions, despite the fearful emotions they stir in us, because I believe that dealing with the issues in advance can increase our chances of accomplishing vital human tasks before dying.

Joyce Kerr is another Mt. Sinai patient who is dying of cancer. She decides to leave the hospital so that she can die at home. There she will have support from hospice services and from family members. Her daughter, Nancy Akbari, reasons this way: “How many nights did she sit with me, it’s just nice to be able to try and give some of that back.”

Mrs. Kerr’s doctor, Sean Morrison, visits regularly and talks with her about her experience. He also helps family members by explaining, with much compassion, what they can expect at each stage of their mother’s dying.

To make this approach to care of the dying the usual way will require drastic changes in the American health care system. Physicians, nurses, and other medical team members must learn to practice medicine differently from the way they learned it in school. They have to recognize that attention to the patient is ultimately more important than attention to the disease. Thus talking and listening become vital approaches to patient care.

These pioneers must also deal with a health care system that has different priorities. Financial incentives often act as a barrier to appropriate care. A huge number of Americans lack health insurance to cover them in times of crisis. Regulations frequently act as barriers to people getting the kind of care they need.  

But the health care reformers shown in the “On Our Own Terms” series are motivated by their conviction that the present system does not serve dying people decently. “I’ve seen too many people die in our intensive care unit in ways that you and I would never want to die,” a doctor tells Bill Moyers.

Palliative care – the relief and control of pain along with attention to the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs of dying patients – can make a vital difference in the way we die. Bill Moyers and his collaborators deserve credit for raising the issues unflinchingly and presenting, in real-life situations, professionals, patients and their families, who have the courage and wisdom to show how it can be done.

Richard Griffin